In a typical quick service restaurant, meals ordered by customers include various food items. Typically, restaurant workers prepare and package these food items at various and relatively diverse areas within the kitchen. Additionally, the components of a food item order and the equipment, supplies and packaging used to prepare, assemble, and package a food item may also be diversely located requiring a worker to travel about the restaurant to accomplish the task of preparing a food item. For example, food items may include buns that need to be conditioned or toasted, sandwich fillings, such as hamburger and sausage patties, chicken and fish filets, and fried and folded eggs, for example, that need to be cooked and thereafter assembled in a sandwich, packaging for the food items such as suitable wrappers, bags or other containers. Crew members or workers are required to travel to various locations within the restaurant to obtain the components that are to be included in the assembled and packaged food item, which may be, for example, a hamburger sandwich. Once the food components are obtained and the food item is assembled and packaged, the packaged food item is then typically manually transported by a human worker walking to one or more meal order assembly areas where the packaged food items are then assembled as part of a meal order including the packaged food item and other items such as drinks. Over the course of the day workers move numerous times between various locations in the store such as to and from cooking food component, assembly, packaging and meal order assembly locations. Worker movements can create bottlenecks at certain locations of the kitchen, and the paths the workers travel may crisscross paths traveled by other workers. This is especially true in the generally limited confines of a quick service restaurant, and also is a particular problem during peak order periods wherein numerous orders must be filled at a rapid pace. Moreover, typical kitchen layouts are an inefficient use of labor adding to the cost of operations.
A need exists for a kitchen system, layout and method of making or assembling food items and packaging them that increases labor efficiencies for food item assembly and packaging, particularly for a quick-service restaurant.
A need exists for a more labor efficient kitchen layout, particularly for a quick-service restaurant.
A need exists to reduce bottlenecks and path crossing of workers that assemble and package food items, particularly in a quick-service restaurant.